by Paul Gamble
79 Which could be an enormous web spun by an ordinary spider. Or an ordinary-sized web spun by an enormous spider. I’ll let you choose.
80 Back in those days people took their names from what they did. If you made roofs you were called Thatcher, if you made horseshoes you were called Smith, and if you promised to look after people’s money for them and then somehow managed to lose it all you were called Banks. Teachers were more often than not called Teach.
81 For those who really need to know, not the original legendary Irish pirate Grace O’Malley, but one of her great granddaughters.
82 Tutus rarely have pockets. It tends to spoil the line of the garment.
83 A good general rule of medical thumb is that if you are running a fever, it is a good idea to drink lots of fluids to avoid dehydration. However, if you are already dead, this isn’t considered necessary. Most doctors advise that if you are dead you should lie very still and try not to talk to people. The not-talking rule isn’t really a health-based rule. It’s just that the living tend to get panicky around talking corpses.
84 They didn’t. I mean it was a good plan, but it wasn’t as cool as the awesome Static.
85 Actually Jack is wrong about this. You can buy a new grandfather, but the warranties on them are very short indeed.
86 Jack was right in this conclusion. Mr. Rackham was descended from a pirate named “Calico Jack” Rackham. Calico Jack was the pirate who came up with the idea for the skull-and-crossbones flag. He was also known for having two women crew members. Because pirates may be greedy, murderous, unpleasant scoundrels, but that doesn’t mean that they’re sexist as well.
87 I think I’ve got that right. Explosions are notoriously difficult to spell.
88 To be perfectly accurate, some of the Pirates couldn’t believe their eyes, while others couldn’t believe their eye. A lot of them had patches.
89 Although we can all agree that it would be better as the Eiffel Roller Coaster.
90 The dinosaur’s name was Bernie. But that’s just a coincidence.
91 Even I couldn’t tell you what happened to Blackbeard Junior. However, it wouldn’t be hard to believe that a certain little old lady, a direct descendant of Grace O’Malley, might have found him still attached to a dinosaur and helped him to escape. Of course that is nothing more than conjecture.
92 Gemma, how proud of me are you that I’ve managed this entire acknowledgments without using a footnote (apart from this one, obviously)? And you said that footnotes were “becoming like a sickness with me.”
93 Holly, what do you think of this as an acknowledgments section? I’m planning to wait until Gemma is busy with something else and then I’m going to jam in a whole lot more footnotes.